Not one of my responses was intended to be hostile or patronizing, but tone can be hard to convey via text. I’m sorry if you took it that way. I was merely pointing out that you arrived at a conclusion that they didn’t state definitively in the article we both read.

That’s because, as I’ve been trying to tell you, they didn’t walk it back. You assumed it meant something that it didn’t.

Way ahead of other ARM chips doesn’t mean that they’re ahead of the best that x64 has to offer, so that’s why games are still built for x64. The transition to ARM may happen someday, but Apple jumped the gun from a gaming perspective. Solving the software problem isn’t just getting SteamOS to run on it, but to get games built for x64 to run on it, and that’s not an easy problem to remedy. Even if it was solved, it likely would not result in better performance than we can get out of AMD’s x64 chips for x64 games on handhelds.

“We are working on Steam Deck 2,” Aldehayyat chimed in. “There is going to be a successor.”

That was seven months ago, and it’s very clear. Successful gaming hardware usually starts prototyping the next one very quickly, even if it’s years away. If they didn’t, then they’d always lag far behind the latest technology. Valve don’t know the year. With tariffs alone, trying to set a release date for a new piece of hardware could be a nightmare.

Yes, I did. I also didn’t read between the lines and take that to mean that they’re not working on it, investing in it, etc. It just means that we can’t predict the future, and what makes sense now might not make sense in a few years when the technology does exist. The Outlook section was the author’s conjecture of what could come to pass, but he can’t predict the future either.

“…we aren’t thinking about new hardware until next year at least” doesn’t mean that they aren’t working on it now. And they seem to have low confidence that said new hardware will even make it out next year. Yes, we are likely years out from a new Steam Deck, and you shouldn’t plan on one being imminent. That’s not the same thing as them no longer working on it.

I’m imagining a lot of regression in compatibility and performance loss, as that’s what I’ve heard of the state of Apple’s new CPU architecture.

The point being that it will resume when the technology exists; it’s not that they lost interest in it.

Word from SkillUp is that you can still load the desktop experience the same way you can on Steam Deck, so that would make it neither locked down nor anti-mods.

Valve isn’t making their next Steam Deck anytime soon because the technology doesn’t exist yet. You can crank up the wattage and put in a bigger battery, but those things make the handheld larger, heavier, and hotter, so they’re not interested. This is a bottleneck from AMD and their R&D.

But especially due to live service anti cheat and Game Pass, I agree that there’s a potential market for this strategy. There’s certainly no way they compete with Sony by doing what consoles have always done.

I too was wondering about MGS4 in the midst of all of these Konami announcements, since Volume 1 was so long ago now. MGS4 is just about the only reason I still have a PS3.

My wife and I rolled credits on Blue Prince. It’s a great puzzle/adventure game, but I don’t think either of us have the patience to see everything it has to offer. It would have been nice if they doled out more ways to control the RNG earlier and more frequently, but they did not.

I’ve also been continuing on with Kingdom Come: Deliverance, the first one. I just had a night of debauchery with a priest in order to progress a main quest line, and then had to give a sermon hung over, which went surprisingly well.

Nothing new. Literally just confirming it was still in development. And of course it was.

SlayPtation

What a typo. But they’ll change their tune as soon as one line crosses another line. I’m willing to pay $70 or $80 for the right game, but my willingness to part with that much money drops precipitously as soon as you make me wade through spoiler-filled GOTY season without having access to the game. When you port the game to PC a year late, I’m probably content to keep waiting for half price.

You know, it’s funny, I’m about halfway through DMC4, and I’m loving it even more than 3 thus far, but even through cultural osmosis, I know a turn is coming. Other than that, I was surprised to find how much I agree with you, having not played 5 yet, but maybe I’m not as fond of the first game as you are; nothing seems to flow in that game compared to later entries, and I’d argue it often has more in common with Dark Souls. I went down this road playing this series because Hi-Fi Rush knocked my socks off, and I’m still expecting that game to have the most in common with DMC5. So far, I’d still say Hi-Fi Rush beats them all, but it got to learn from them, after all.

Invincible Vs shot to the top of my list as I learned more about it, as it combines some of my favorite fighting game mechanics and design philosophies. Clockwork Revolution looked better and larger in scope than I thought it would be. The Outer Worlds 2 continues to look great, and this showcase didn’t change my mind. Super Meat Boy 3D was a big surprise, and it looks like the right way to move that game into 3D.

Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 are both on consoles.

https://store.playstation.com/en-us/product/UP0346-CUSA15671_00-BGANDBGIICONSOLE/

I can’t say I follow you. I would call it satire rather than “totally random”, but if you didn’t care for the writing, you didn’t care for the writing.

I wouldn’t categorize it that way at all. It extrapolated nationality to one’s employer and religion to the law. It was unsubtle in its views of classism and such, in a way that I appreciated, but it wasn’t just doing zany things “just because”, unless you’ve got a good example that’s slipping my mind.

Is this where we bring up the old Mega Man X Sequelitis video again? Chances are the best tutorial is the one you don’t even realize is a tutorial. There was also a trend that I first noticed around the time of Gears of War where the tutorial would not only be built into the story so that you wouldn’t feel like it was chore, but they’d also give you the opportunity to just skip it.

It’s quite nice, actually. Not all work on a game is equally worthwhile. Lots of my favorite franchises have devolved into games that grew larger to their own detriment. It doesn’t often happen that one of these types of games scales back down. And it’s not like there are zero big games that I like; Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3 are both 100+ hour games that are some of my favorites of all time! But unlike a lot of big games, they actually felt like there was something interesting to see for that full runtime, whereas a lot of big games actively harm their pacing by filling it with uninteresting bloat.